Cognitive Neuroscience and childhood poverty: Progress and Promise.

LIPINA, SEBASTIAN JAVIER; MCCANDLISS, BRUCE D.

Oslo

Workshop; Rethinking poverty and children in the new millenium: Linking Research and Policy.; 2007

Comprarative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) y Childwatch

The scientific study of the impact of poverty on child development has more than eight decades of history. Since both poverty and development are characterized by their multidimensional nature, the study of the underlying mechanisms involved in their interactions, as well as the design of interventions aimed at modifying them, require the incorporation of multidisciplinary frameworks that consider different epistemological, historic, cultural, ethical and ideological issues. Effects of poverty on development involve multiple alterations and impacts physical growth, neuronal, cognitive and socioemotional development throughout life-span. Many of these effects may be mediated by impact of multiple environmental risk factors, present in nearly all the rearing contexts where children grow up -home, school, and community. As it is possible that policies that involve implementation of interventions that directly target the factors that mediate the harmful effect of poverty on human development, basic and applied experimental research may make important contributions to understanding the mediating factors by which poverty negatively impacts child development, and may help to design and evaluate interventions. Specifically, such research may contribute to identifying, testing, and implementing intervention principles, as well as help assess a number of pragmatic implementation issues such as the amount of time, materials, and human capital needed to carry out such interventions on a larger scale. Cognitive Science and Neuroscience research revealed that development of the neurocognitive systems related to control, numeracy and literacy competences show plasticity during brain organization and reorganization processes. These findings have started to be applied to interventions in the form of promising training manual and computer programs aimed to induce brain and behavioural changes in normal and disordered children. Considering the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie the relationship between cognition and achievement, allow to open new avenues to investigating and understanding the socioeconomic gaps in several cognitive and learning competences. In addition, neurocognitive analysis may reveal different socioeconomic-related factors playing several mediating roles across neurocognitive systems. Over the last ten years, increasingly neuroscientists have begun to join collaborative efforts with other social scientists to contribute, both conceptually and methodologically, in the study of poverty effects on basic cognitive processes. This paper seeks to outline the contributions and potential of these cognitive neuroscience collaborations on poverty and child-development. Several of the topics center around identification of brain plasticity mechanisms involved in learning, the study of the emergence of basic cognitive functions such as attention, emotional self-regulation, language processes, how these cognitive processes play out in early literacy and numeracy skills, and the possibility to modify the emergence of these skills through novel cognitive training methods. Although research at each of these levels of complexity may potentially inform the specific ways in which poverty influences cognitive and brain development, it is likely that some of the most direct policy implications aimed at improving the development of children at risk due to poverty will come first from cognitive intervention efforts.